CAREY ON MICHELE
Click here to access that fantastic web site Starlet Showcase to see wonderful photos of sex kitten Michele Carey. She is profiled in my book Glamour Girls of Sixties Hollywood and below is an excerpt on her career during the 60s:
Michele Carey arrived in Hollywood in 1964 with her young son in tow and quickly snagged decorative minor roles on TV as an U.N.C.L.E. agent in “The Double Affair” on The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and the sexy girlfriend of James Callahan in a few episodes of the George Burns/Connie Stevens sitcom Wendy and Me. Her first movie role was a minor part as a kimono-clad beauty a jealous Annette Funicello finds with Dwayne Hickman at his bachelor pad and then chases away in How to Stuff a Wild Bikini (1965).
Howard Hawks, who previously rejected Carey for a role in his race car drama Red Line 7000, handed her a leading role in his entertaining western El Dorado (1967), a remake of his own Rio Bravo. With her wild mane of uncombed sun-streaked hair and husky voice, Carey was perfectly cast as the rebellious Joey a young woman who wears buckskin pants, rides a horse bareback, and carries a rifle. During the course of the movie she shoots hired gun John Wayne mistakenly thinking he killed her brother and tussles with him (the Duke trips her and then smears her shirt with blood from his gunshot wound) and his young sidekick, James Caan.
Fans got to see Carey’s gorgeous set of gams in The Sweet Ride (1968) about aimless young people ensconced in the Southern California beach culture. Michele played Thumper Stevens an adult film star longing to get pregnant by her beatnik boyfriend Bob Denver who shares a Malibu beach house with surfer Michael Sarrazin and tennis hustler Tony Franciosa. She more than held her own in both senses of the word opposite the film’s female lead Jacqueline Bisset.
It was back to Malibu for Carey in her next movie Live a Little, Love a Little (1968) opposite Elvis Presley in one of his hippest films of the Sixties despite sleeping with the hot brunette with a bed board between them. Carey was cast as a mini-skirted free spirit who keeps changing her name and can’t decide between playboy photographer Elvis whom she slips a pill causing him to have a psychedelic freak out scene and her staid boyfriend Dick Sargent. Guess who wins out?
In Changes (1969), a coming-of-age flick, Carey is simply charming as a swinging carnival chick who beds college student Kent Lane and wants to settle down with him but the aimless youth abandons her. Keeping her face familiar to TV audiences, Carey turned up playing a dancer and murder suspect in “The Ring of Anasis” on T.H.E. Cat, a bad girl who meets a golden end as she tries to steal a stone that can turn minerals into gold in “The Night of the Feathered Fury” on The Wild Wild West, and an IMF agent in “The Brothers” on Mission: Impossible.
